Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Anima: Soul / Animation (Latin origin)
The existence and nature of the soul is one of the most important, if not the most important subject of theological, philosophical and artistic search of Man. Because, through the search for the essence and truth that are hidden behind the mystery of the soul, we are seeking the essence and truth of the archetypal concepts of existence and creation, in essence of life itself. The self-existent spiritual, mental state and its continuation after the end of the carnal matter, concerns human societies since their origin, an issue always formed in the collective conscious or unconscious by the respective political, social and religious conditions and perceptions.
The subject of my overall study is the depiction in the art of Japanese anime of the mystery of the soul and similar questions that it entails as well as the connection of art with the wider worldviews of Japanese society. The ways in which Japanese anime artists converse, through their films, with their own culture will be presented and analyzed in detail. Therefore, what is studied is the philosophical, religious, sociological, ritual, folklore dialectic that the art of anime develops with the History of its culture. Next, the Japanese anime production is compared to the depiction of this issue in the animated creations of the West and their own connections with their respective cultures, which will, consequently, lead to the search for similarities and differences of cultures with each other, namely, Japanese and European - Greek.
Through the art of animation, an interdisciplinary research of Eastern and Western, Japanese and Greek culture is developed, with sociological, philosophical, folklore, religious, artistic, and cultural conclusions in general.
More specificcaly, the core of this presentation will be an area of my general phd thesis and it will have to do with the Shinto and animism references of Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" film, its connections with Japanese and Greek mythology subjects and how the essence of the film provides soul as the main issue of life and world around us.